If you go

• What: “LumenoCity”: Visual effects using Music Hall as a “canvas” in two free concerts by the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra, Louis Langrée and John Morris Russell, conductors • When: 8:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, rain or shine. • Where: Washington Park, Over-the-Rhine. Brings lawn chairs, blankets. • The program: The first half will be led by Russell, the Pops’ conductor, with members of the May Festival Chorus, dancers from Cincinnati Ballet's CBII and singers from Cincinnati Opera. Langrée will lead the 40-minute second half, starting at approximately 9:30 p.m. The visual spectacle will play to the opening fanfare from Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra”; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 (finale); the Shaker melody from Copland’s “Appalachain Spring”; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (finale); and Ravel’s “Bolero.” • Food and seating: Pre-purchase food baskets through Findlay Market. Food baskets may be ordered at www.eventbrite.com/event/7383015799/es2. Food trucks will be available in the Emanuel Community Center parking area on Race Street. Over-the-Rhine restaurants will offer special dinner packages. • Parking, street closures and shuttles: Paid parking in the Washington Park garage; free parking at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal with free shuttles starting at 6:30 p.m. both evenings. Elm Street will close at 8 p.m. between Grant and 14th streets, except for limited access to the Washington Park Garage and the lot between Memorial Hall and Music Hall, both nights.

Making it happen

• Lumenocity’s major funders are the Carol Ann & Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation and Procter & Gamble. Other resources came from The John A. Schroth Family Charitable Trust, The Johnson Foundation, The Kaplan Foundation and other individuals and companies. • The creative team includes CET, ArtWorks, 3CDC, Agar, Landor Associates, Prestige Audio Visual and Creative Services and Rockfish Interactive.

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Curious Over-the-Rhine residents have flocked recently to the bright lights of tests for a colorful digital light show coming soon to the facade of Music Hall.

“LumenoCity,” Saturday and Sunday in Washington Park, will be like no other experience in the world, organizers say. On these nights, a display of light projections using Music Hall as a canvas will synch with a 40-minute, live performance by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It is the first time anywhere for a combined show of light and live orchestra music.

The event, free to the public, is expected to draw 20,000 people to the park over two nights. It will be visible from other areas, such as Mount Adams, across the region.

The effort took six months of planning and an estimated $500,000, including production costs.

It’s part of a community-wide celebration to welcome Louis Langrée, incoming music director of the Cincinnati Symphony. He’ll conduct half of the concert. The event will also shine a light on Music Hall, badly in need of renovation.

The event is also an effort to show off what’s world-class about Cincinnati: its creativity, its industry, its Over-the-Rhine neighborhood with Music Hall and a reborn Washington Park and its symphony.

LumenoCity is a groundbreaking collaboration.

“It will highlight the creative underground that lives in Cincinnati,” says Steve McGowan, executive creative director of Landor Associates, Downtown, a partner in the project. “People are going to see that this is a creative hotbed of graphic designers, motion designers, filmmakers, musicians, all of that.”

When the sun goes down, Langrée will give the downbeat to the trumpet fanfare that opens Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” – famously used in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” – while, simultaneously, a bank of 12 high-powered (30,000-lumen) projectors will stream an ever-changing play of colorful scenes onto Music Hall from a block away on Race Street.

“With projections, you can suspend disbelief. You can create illusion,” says McGowan, comparing it to an M.C. Escher painting. “It’s infinite in possibilities of how to express color, texture, pattern, image and dimensionality. It becomes a portal to a whole new world.”

Designers at Landor, a brand-consulting and design firm with 25 offices around the globe, have created the illusions by using architectural digital mapping. The animations will be timed and choreographed to the music in real time. Bricks and mortar could melt away or change into something entirely new. People – and perhaps a few of Music Hall’s ghosts – could appear in windows or walk through doors.

Organizers aren’t saying exactly how, but the audience will get involved, too. McGowan describes the event as “part cinema and part art installation” – with thousands of your closest friends.

The event will be recorded for broadcast on WCET-TV (Channel 48) in November and be distributed globally through YouTube starting Sept. 17.

The project has involved creative teams across the city. There were brainstorming sessions as far away as in Paris with Langrée.

The visual element started on a computer. Every detail of the contour of the historic, 1878 landmark was mapped in 3-D.

“Mapping is the key word,” says Dan Reynolds, Landor’s creative director, who led the visual team. “Every window, every little balcony and archway are all precisely mapped. So when we get into the animation process, we use those elements. At night, it creates a unique illusion. You’re playing those things, and all of a sudden they shake, rattle or turn, and it appears to be that the building is moving and coming to life.”

Landor’s visual artists got together with members of the symphony to figure out how the music would play into their creative process, and “to get people who were not visual thinkers to think visually,” Reynolds says.

As the animations were created, the challenge was figuring out how to synch them to music. Reynolds, of Edgewood, had never seen an orchestra score and had not attended the symphony since eighth grade. He flew to Paris for a music lesson with Langrée at his home, where the two studied each of the five classical pieces to be played, taking into account tempos and moods. Reynolds took copious notes.

The process is a bit like choreographing music to a fireworks show, but the music will be live.

“We’re capturing the spirit of the pieces and creating visual landscapes to go with these pieces, based on what we think the music is,” Reynolds said. “We have to balance it with the performance of the orchestra. We don’t want either one to overpower the other. There are times when one will be the hero of the moment, and it will go back and forth.”

Logistics include building a control station on Race Street, which will hold computers for the show as well as the 200-pound projectors that will project over the orchestra tent and the audience, across Washington Park’s great lawn and onto Music Hall.

Although the digital technology has been used at places such as the Sydney Opera House, which has built a festival around light projections, this is believed to be the first use of a live orchestra as part of such a show.

It started as the celebration of a new music director and an effort to bring attention to Music Hall’s needs. But there is other potential. LumenoCity could turn into an annual festival, or a launching pad for new kinds of public art, says Tim Maloney, president and CEO of the Carol Ann & Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation.

Landor’s team brainstormed a name, which pairs “lumen” and “city,” that could be brought back year after year.

“If we’re illuminating the arts in Cincinnati and we also have this inner glowing light, let’s celebrate that,” McGowan says. “Let’s welcome Louis in a grand way and celebrate the building, but also the community it lives in and the people of the community.” ⬛